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As part of the young scene in Prenzlauer Berg his pictures owed more than a little to cultural pessimism under socialist auspices. But over a colorful base of defiant melancholy and detachment a distinct position always radiated, a sense of “and yet…”

Beyond any ideological accommodation, Killisch’s work vibrated with such a strong description of the state of being that whatever his pictures expressed was never plaintive, it always had a powerful resonance.

Klaus Killisch’s first solo exhibition was held in 1988 in Zinnober, the shop-front premises of the Zinnober theater group at Knaackstraße 45 in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. Organized by the writer Ulrich Zieger (1961–2015), the exhibition was backed by the team behind the underground magazine Verwendung. In perfect style the Lippok brothers’ legendary band Ornament & Verbrechen played at the exhibition opening.

Killisch’s strongest pictures in the period between 1987 and 1991 were rooted in demonstrative symbolism, easily identifiable references to rock music, and strong willful colors. This made them hard to exploit by the socialist establishment’s art business.

Western radio and TV stations were easily accessible in East Berlin, keeping audiences in the eastern part of the city well abreast with their counterparts in the West. International trends ruled the subcultures. People dressed stylishly and surfed casually on the wave of big city philosophy, conversing rapturously about Heiner Müller and texts by young poets. Bonjour Tristesse. Numerous “alternative” bands made noisy sounds against the limits of the system in cellars, clubs, and churches, proudly holding their own with bands in the West. Punk, New Wave, dilettante attacks and robust, defiant attitudes set the tone. Killisch’s pictures, not overtly intellectualized and not overly anti-cultural, were the right kind of background for this fractious rebellion. They shared common ground with the paintings and photographs of Wolfram A. Scheffler, Gerd Sonntag, Thomas Florschuetz, Klaus Hähner-Springmühl (1950–2006), and Trak Wendisch, the sculptures of Frank Seidel and the performances of self-piercing artists.

The moods of Killisch’s pictures matched the zeitgeist and spawned cognitive associations. 5 nach 4 (5 Past 4, 1988) felt like a Tom Waits pose, while Seele brennt (Soul Burning, 1989) was a dialogue with the West Berlin band Einstürzenden Neubauten. Wanderlust became political in Mauerdurchbruch (Wall Breach, 1987), Bellevue (1988) and Mann vor Mauer (Man Before Wall, 1988). By then, incidentally, fewer and fewer pictures in East Germany focused on the Berlin Wall at all. The majority of East German artists blended out their own imprisonment and that of the mass of East Germany’s population. A deep fear of reprisals haunted the state governed by Stasi surveillance. Still, the Wall didn’t succeed in dimming the golden age of TV. Killisch’s works Das Mondgesicht (Moonface, 1987), Teutonisches Bild (Teutonic Picture, 1989) and Blue Velvet (1989) feel like mystery thrillers and aim for a tongue in cheek, detached attitude toward the dangerous urges and chaste paranormal romances from Hollywood.

Killisch saw the surfaces of his pictures as a realm of surprises from the very beginning. With his usual lively awareness, after 1987 he focused on incorporating the advertising design of enamel panels from the prewar era that he found in a Berlin cellar into his works. This was followed in the 1990s by the traditional silk artificial flowers from Sebnitz, to which he gave a key role in his pictures for some time.

When Killisch presents illusionary spaces today, fitting his pictures into pictorial wallpaper, when he combines disc covers, poster motifs, magazine photos, song texts and sounds that illustrate, concentrate, and explain his personal perspective, he arranges all the cited components in order, and even repositions them in a way that hints at interpretation. A concept like this is cheerful cultural science and openly combative painting at the same time.

It makes sense that Killisch’s concept for the Cottbus Diesel Power Station Art Museum is also a spatial installation.

Killisch is a modern interpreter of sounds and psychic textures of his generation. As a painter and musician he combines his own story with world and pop history. He synchronizes his everyday life as an artist and family man with rock music, and searches for clues in areas relating to the interplay of the culture industry, the media, and social dynamics. In this orbit Killisch presents complexes of high culture and counterculture that allow him not only to emancipate pop but also to confirm high culture in its own language. Killisch acts like a translator who can layer cultural meanings on top of each other in a kaleidoscopic way. If you float along with Killisch on his image trip you meet The Doors, Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, and other cult pop icons. Yet if you look closer you can also detect Killisch’s acknowledgement of 19th-century artists: Blake, Füssli, and Moreau. Killisch keeps all his options open with his non-linear montage.

While preparing an exhibition in Kunstpavillon Heringsdorf in 2011 Killisch discovered a kindred spirit, the Lithuanian composer and painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911), who tried to achieve a synthesis of the two forms of art. It is no coincidence that Killisch felt close to an artist like Čiurlionis because he was also a border crosser – but in a different age. In Čiurlionis’s case it was the tendencies of nihilist philosophy, folk songs and romantic symphonies, the literature of classic authors, and esoteric influences that fascinated him and inspired his creativity. Killisch, on the other hand, is interested in popular song-making of our times: rock and pop since the late 1960s, as well as present-day sound developments from post-rock, the spirit that speaks out of the echoing swirling sounds of the Hammond organ or makes use of totally freaking-out guitars.

Čiurlionis was a genius with dual talents. He painted what he composed and composed what he painted. He is famously quoted as saying, “I imagine the world as a painted symphony.” He described pictures as sonatas or preludes and piano pieces as “symphonic landscapes.” Killisch, by contrast, offers us the reproduction of his own artist’s studio as a space for creation and dreams in montages, collages and samplings.

The story of the discs began in the Bar Ambulance, which became an adjunct in 2002 of the bar-restaurant Silberstein on Oranienburger Straße in Berlin-Mitte. The owner, Sangare “Oseno” Siemsen, originally a painter and a key figure in the era around the end of the Berlin Wall, was a friend of Klaus Killisch. He asked Killisch to design a ceiling picture – including all the discs “Oseno” himself had played as a DJ. The finished ceiling covered over twenty meters and stoked up the feeling of life and those times back in the wild 1990s. Since then Killisch has experimented extensively with lacquers and has deliberately tried to insert LPs complete with their sleeves into his pictures as radical constructions that fit turntables.

In his pictures Killisch tries to process our exciting, confusing world. He takes the evident idea of using sound documents literally and collages the sound media into his pictures. The painting surfaces can but don’t necessarily create correspondences to the sounds that can actually be heard on the LPs. The pictorial elements illuminate snatches of rhythm, wind-borne voice fragments, and the sound surfaces that sometimes race by, sometimes flicker and sometimes swirl, depending on the musical style.

It makes no difference whether the sounds on the LPs are catchy or accessible at all. It is irrelevant for the picture because it is not about a translation from sound into image. It doesn’t matter whether the black vinyl discs contain melodies that offer clues – every picture by Killisch develops its rhythm according to visual criteria. Killisch doesn’t pick his favorite discs or those he would regard as somehow relevant. They are usually discs he gets by the boxful from DJs who get them as promos from the music industry. He seldom deliberately buys an LP to put it in a picture. And yet the repetitive circular element of the disc repeatedly creates the structure in the artistic sense, and pasting the album cover into the picture gives a signal that reminds us of a specific style at a particular time. Connoisseurs who remember the songs from the LPs in the pictures will enjoy this all the more because the beats triggered in their inner ear will not get lost somewhere in infinity but to some extent will provide the sound setting for the picture, or Killisch’s visual idea will illuminate the sounds to be remembered and will mingle with stimuli from all areas of life.

In the first place, then, a Killisch picture with discs is an aggregate that bundles diverse energy currents. A mix of different visual elements, it strains its viewers’ attention span. Every LP and every other identifiable pictorial detail offers an isolated statement that is rounded off by the whole composition and reinforced by the picture title.

However, this relative isolation of visual passages that can be augmented by other not clearly identifiable particles of samples and collages such as LP covers and/or enlarged copies of magazine photos is only partly artificial or artistic. It corresponds to everyday experience. Our reception of a work like this is determined by the duality of what flows in and what lingers as an echo. The details of the picture are added up, dramatically reinforced and projected outward like good vibrations. They are the signs of a desire that appears to us visually in a splintered and thus open structure.

The LPs (that can obviously be heard anytime via archive sources) tell us in audial terms, and the color and structural patterns tell us in tactile terms what is actually happening in each of the artworks. Whatever happens on this aesthetic double-track in the minds or hearts of the hearers remains on the level of meditation, offers neither solutions nor explanations, but creates a free space for associations and, at best, develops the audience’s area for experience and language.

We don’t know what the painter Karl Hofer (1878–1955) was listening to when he painted the picture Mädchen mit Schallplatte (Girl with a Gramophone Record) in 1941. Was it classical music? Was it a banned Swing disc? The painter had already made a pencil sketch on the theme in 1939. A lost version of his painting Mädchen mit Grammofon (Girl with a Gramophone) is thought to date from 1928. By 1954 at the latest, Hofer had painted three pictures around the same topic and further sketches, watercolors and prints. Similar pictures show female figures holding a triangle or a guitar.

Whereas Hofer’s pictures use music and sound in trying to sample the grooves of yearning in our happy and fulfilled existence as human beings, Killisch firmly believes that humans “can’t make a system out of authenticity, but can only collect,” as Alexander Kluge tells us in Chronik der Gefühle (The Chronicle of Feeling). One of Killisch’s recent titles for a series and a picture is Die Welt ist eine Scheibe (The World is a Disc). What happens in Killisch’s spaces actually makes us realize that every perception is synesthetic, that people not only hear but also generally see and feel as well in the process, and that space can transform into sound by physical laws that not everyone understands. A delusional world grants us a Delirium in Hi-Fi. The artist’s intention now is to maximize the accessibility of this realm of imagination that, due to its subjectivity, is delimited by the guitar barrage and the bass boom.

One of the many contributions that Klaus Killisch’s artwork brings to the conversation about recombining, freestlye collage is the absolute joy he takes in recovering the iconic markers of our shared cultural history. Killisch’s artwork is refreshed by an almost boyish embrace of the past, any past, as an archivist in an icon factory. Whether he is reframing or modifying images from early Hollywood Westerns (The Boy From Mixed Run) or gluing vinyl records on canvas beside massive hairstyles (Hair to Eternity), Killisch’s paintings defy the hierarchy of high and low. In his art there is no forced distinction between the genuine and the ironic, between the Grand Canyon and the Grand Canyon gift shop. Both are of equal use and significance, both are embraceable with the same awe. As such, this is an art of inclusion—a happy insistence on everything, anything. Finding its way into the grand stage of his large painting is big hair one day and Durer the next.

There is a particularity to this awe that is central to Killisch’s world. As a painter coming of age in the DDR mid-1980s, there is always the sense of both awe and disbelief in the cultural icons that he collects. In his art, critical distance is often replaced with wonder. This is not the same as naivete, but, in fact, it is closer to the position of the stateless flaneur. Killisch reminds us that to live in this moment of technological speed is to always play catch up. What’s happens when that catch up is a “given” cultural history—“given” as a both a gift and as a pre-determined assumption. This complexity is most evident in Killisch’s 1992 series Flowers, where plastic flowers are hand-sewn into the canvasses. The nostalgia here is not in the image or the technique, but for the closing of the artificial flower factory near Dresden that could no longer compete on the World Market after the wall went down. Killisch drove down to the factory and loaded his car up with the sad symbols of an eastern bloc yesteryear, and revitalized them in his paintings. A gesture not dissimilar to Donald Judd traveling to New Jersey to discover a new plastic to make art with (as reported by Robert Smithson). In his latest series, Krieger und Helme (2007), there is a similar affect where the cut n’ paste collage of architectually ornate Baroque details shape up to overblown heads and headdresses. These heads sit seamlessly on contemporary clothing, and then that image is interrupted by the outlines of neo-expressionistic figures suggestive of Killisch’s own early work. This suggestion operates as an appropriation of his own work in collision with these ornate images.

Killisch’s embrace of pop culture and an art of inclusion extends itself, almost organically, to the web. Through his various musical compositions, videos, faux operas, installations, etc., we see what collage might look like in the 21st century. To spend an hour at Killisch’s website (www.magnetberg.de) is to understand how the art of collage has been taken out of the gallery and onto the web. Killisch treats the possibilities of web art as a sort of new way to think about collaboration and the possibility of something akin to “street art”. In these collaborations and video pieces, Killisch furthers his commitment to inclusion, to an everyday art and a practice that is continually open to new ideas of community and social space. Each project, each collaboration informs the world view of this art and the wondrous relationship it has to the past, present and future.